Just Going To Put This Here…

Since about… Spring break? this year, I’ve been working on a subsector generator for Classic Traveller. Before, I was content to use the Mongoose Traveller generation tools, but since I got my hands on the CT books, I just can’t abide anything else.

Recently, I completed automation of most of the Expanded World Generation rules, which starts with determining the number of stars (solitary, binary, or trinary system), the number of orbitals, the number of empty orbits, the number of gas giants, planetoids and planetesimals, and captured planets–not to mention satellites for all of the above.

I think the maximum number of objects approaches 400 but it’s hard to be sure. In practice (from running hundreds of tests), you have between ten and thirty objects per system. Then you generate populations for each of the worlds and satellites (based on proximity to the star it orbits), and find the highest population in the system and make that the main world.

Then there are all the normal main world steps–generating starport, technology level, government, law, trade codes… all that good stuff.

The next step then, is doing this for all the worlds in a subsector (average of 40 times for a typical subsector) and mapping the thing (spoiler alert: pictured above). That’s just to create the “milieu” or hexcrawl for a typical campaign.

Right now I have the trade codes and starport printing, and it’s really just a matter of time before I get the other stuff. I’m pretty excited for the whole thing. It should be fairly trivial to get the main worlds printing to a CSV (that’s what I had going earlier this year), but I’m going to take it a step farther and get CSVs for every star system.

I also picked up the Stars Without Number books, including Dead Names, which means I can hypothetically generate meddlesome alien progenitors for each star system–not to mention the fact I picked up T4: Pocket Empires, so I could also automate the generation of entire interstellar trade empires!

Sure, I’ve been working on D&D stuff too, but I don’t really have any visuals for that stuff (yet!). Just to give you an idea of what I’m doing there…

I have this idea for an algorithm to automate multilevel dungeon generation. If I apply some of the ideas and concepts I’ve picked up from working on this Traveller project to that–I could automate the generation of entire megadungeons… regions and regions of hexcrawls… did I mention I already got treasure generation? Phew! So much going on…